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About Lazy Hiker Brewing Co.

Our Story

Lazy Hiker Brewing Company is a craft brewery located way up in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The goal of the brewery is the idea to do something good.

• We want to bring a good benefit to our town of Franklin, NC.

• We want to be a good fit for the mountain region that we love.

• And we want to do all that with good beer.

Our brewery and taproom are located right downtown in Franklin, NC in the former Town Hall and Fire Department.

Look for our beers on draft around Western North Carolina and if you’re driving through Franklin or hiking by on the nearby Appalachian Trail, walk down and check out the place. Grab a bite to eat at the food truck. Take a glance out back and get a peak at our 15 barrel brewhouse.

We’re only a short hike off the trail.

The Brewery

Lazy Hiker Brewing Company produces beer on a 2 vessel 15 barrel system. We sourced the parts far and wide in order to ensure that it would operate exactly as we wanted. In our brewery, we mill the grain and then combine it with water in the mash & lauter tun in order to free and extract the sugars. From there, the liquid goes to the kettle where it is boiled, hops are added, and then spun around in a whirlpool giving us one more chance to add hops. Once chilled, the beer heads to a fermentor to meet yeast and be transformed into beer.
The brewing process takes only a day but produces only the sweet hopped wort that will become beer. That transformation process is called fermentation, conditioning, and packaging and it takes another few weeks, pushing the total production time to about 4 weeks depending on the particular beer. And what do we do with the rest of our time? Clean. Always cleaning. Checking on the beer and cleaning - something, anything, everything!